VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
Sentence 065:
Das Paar hat-t-e sich in Leipe, einer
DEF:N:SG AUX couple AUX-PST-3S REFL:3S ILL Leipe INDEF-F:SG:DAT
klein-en Stadt in Deutschland, nieder-ge-lass-en.
small-F:SG:DAT town ILL Germany VPREF-PP-settle-PP
In principle, the sentence is designed in an iambic rhythm which demands a weak node
on the first syllable of “hatte”, which is nevertheless supposed to be stronger than the
definite article “das”, due to lexical primary stress on the first syllable, and a weak node
on the second syllable of “Deutschland”, which, as a compositum, might nevertheless
retain some degree of stress. “Stadt”, being the head of the adposition, receives less
prominence than “Paar”. The fourth syllable of “niedergelassen” has a secondary stress,
and it can be assumed that the vowel is slightly stronger than the one in “Deutschland”.
Therefore, as concerns the vowel /a/, the hierarchy of stresses should be as follows:
Paar > Stadt > niedergelassen > Deutschland > hatte > das
With respect to the modification of spectral shape, F1 is supposed to gradually decrease
with decreasing prosodic strength, F2 and F3 are supposed to gradually rise.
As regards F1, the vowel /A/ in “Paar” received the highest value by all speakers.
Five speakers (sp180, so129, sp082, sp012, and sp126) attributed a lower or at least
equal 154 F2 value to the vowel /A/ in “Paar”. Sp127 had a lower F2 in “Deutschland”.
Four speakers (sp180, sp129, sp126, sp127) exposed a lower or equal F3 in “Paar”.
Sp082 attributed lower F3 values to the vowels /A/ of “Stadt” and “niedergelassen”.
Sp012 had a lower F3 value in “Stadt” and “hatte”. In sum, every person attributed a
higher F1 and either a lower F2 or a lower F3 to the vowel /A/ in “Paar”. Therefore, this
vowel received highest prominence by all speakers. This result corroborates the
observations made by Wagner (2002) that speakers show a high agreement both on the
placing and the modelling of primary stress. Moreover, as regards the vowel /A/, F1
seems to be of higher relevance for modelling stress than either F2 or F3.
154 Means in this case that the negative z-score (= F2 is lower in another vowel /A/ than in the
vowel /A/ of “Paar”) ≤ 1.5.
228